Susan Sontag's Photography at 50
- Written by Andrew Milne, Lecturer in Philosophy, The University of Western Australia

This year marks 50 years since Susan Sontag’s essay Photography was published in the New York Review of Books. Slightly edited and renamed In Plato’s Cave, it would become the first essay in her collection On Photography[1], which has never been out of print.
The breadth of Photography is immense. It ranges over artistic, commercial, photojournalistic, and popular uses of photography; and it discusses the photograph’s role in both sensitising and desensitising us to other people’s suffering – a theme Sontag reconsidered 30 years later in her final book, Regarding the Pain of Others[2].
But perhaps nowhere is Sontag’s enduring relevance as a critic clearer than in the essay’s analysis of photography as both a symptom and a source of our pathological relationship to reality.
Sontag described photography as “a defense against anxiety”. She saw that it had become a coping mechanism. Confronted with the chaotic surfeit of sensation, we retreat behind the protection of the camera, whose one-eyed, one-sensed perspective makes the world seem maniable.
Sontag claimed that we photograph most when we feel most insecure, particularly when we are in an unfamiliar place where we don’t know how to react or what is expected of us. Taking a photograph becomes a way of attenuating the otherness of a place, holding it at a distance.
Tourists use their cameras as shields between themselves and whatever they encounter. According to Sontag, photography gives the tourist’s experience a definite structure: “stop, take a photograph, and move on.”
Having taken a photograph, we think of its subject as our captive: it’s there now, on the film, in the camera’s memory. This can make us inept observers. There is no need to experience something now, as we can always review it later. So we grab and run.
Even if we compose carefully, if we “make” rather than “take” a photograph, we are likely to feel the release of the shutter as the release of a bond, as if we now can (or must) move on – to other photographs.
I was there
Photography is a way of testifying I saw this, I was there.
Kodak’s marketing through the early 20th century testifies to this urge. “Take a Kodak with you” was one of the company’s earliest slogans. By 1903, they were announcing that “a vacation without a Kodak is a vacation wasted”.
Sontag wrote:
A way of certifying experience, taking photographs is also a way of refusing it – by converting experience into an image, a souvenir. Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.
Read more https://theconversation.com/tourists-in-our-own-reality-susan-sontags-photography-at-50-197615